Visitors to this Sunday's ''Big Things In Store'' exhibition at the Australian War Memorial's Mitchell storage facility will be able to get up close and personal with the mother of all surface-to-air missiles.
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Although dwarfed by the nearby V-2 rocket, the AWM's Enzian anti-aircraft missile is one of the rarest products of what Winston Churchill called the Nazis' ''perverted science'' to have survived the war.
Only two of the rocket-powered missiles, which were designed to break up American daylight bomber formations over Germany, are known to exist.
Materials shortages and developmental delays meant they were never used in action.
With last year's ''Big Things In Store'' cancelled at the last minute due to the Mitchell fire, Sunday's event is the first opportunity for the public to see the AWM's big treasures since 2010. New additions include a Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation Sabre jet fighter, albeit with American markings, and an Iroquois helicopter.
The AWM's senior curator for military technology, John White, says the Australian Enzian, which was studied by Australian and British scientists at Woomera in the post-war years, is one of the cornerstones of the memorial's world-class collection of Nazi super weapons.
The Mitchell facility also houses two of the first ''smart bombs'', the Fritz-X and Henschel HS 293. The Henschel, a late-build example of a weapon credited with destroying or seriously damaging at least 30 Allied ships, is a prototype featuring guide-wire technology.
Mr White said the Enzian, which carried a 300-kilogram warhead and was intended to reach Allied bomber formations in the shortest possible time, was a triumph of design and improvisation.
While its main engine, infra-red proximity fuse and booster rockets represented the very cutting edge of technology, they were housed in a lightweight casing screwed and glued together out of bits of scrap timber and then planed down into an aerodynamic shape.
''The intent was to use as few vital war materials as possible,'' Mr White said.
The AWM's full house of German ''wonder weapons'' is completed by three items housed in the main memorial complex. They include a V-1 flying bomb or ''doodle bug'', a Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter and the incredibly rare Me 163 ''Komet'' rocket plane which donated a lot of its DNA to the Enzian.
A manned aircraft, the Me 163 was capable of almost 1000km/h and could reach altitudes of more 12,000 metres within minutes of takeoff.
Mr White says while the German wonder weapons were, in some ways, remarkable achievements they had a dark and shameful history that robbed them of any special glamour or allure.
The AWM's V-2, for example, was put together by slave labourers working under the shadow of death in an underground factory, Camp Dora Mittelbau, near Nordhausen in central Germany.
It is believed almost half of the 60,000 slave labourers used at the facility were either beaten or starved to death.
''Many more people were killed building the V-2 than the weapon itself actually killed,'' Mr White said.
